1. Field of the Invention
This disclosure is generally related to database systems. More specifically, this disclosure is related to methods and apparatus that generate audit commands for auditing database objects.
2. Related Art
Database and information systems are an important factor in the operation of most businesses. It is critical that database administrators employ effective database security measures that safeguard these systems against unintended misuse and malicious attacks. As a part of these security measures, database administrators typically monitor how information is being accessed on the database by auditing the commands that are performed on a given database object. Specifically, these database administrators create audit commands that trigger an audit for specific database objects, and cause access operations on these database objects to be recorded in an audit trail.
Unfortunately, an audit command needs to be generated for each database object that is to be audited. To make matters worse, the amount of information stored on a database continues to grow as disk storage devices grow in capacity, and organizations find new ways of using this storage capacity. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly difficult for database administrators to correctly identify and audit the growing number of objects stored in a database.
For example, if a company desires to audit all database access operations associated with a given project, database administrators face the daunting task of having to identify all database objects associated with this given project, and then having to generate an explicit set of audit commands that are directed to auditing the complete set of identified database objects.
For these reasons, typical database auditing tools are not sufficiently equipped to help database administrators audit large database systems.